Cover Page Sketch

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Today I made a few sketches for potential cover pages. The challenge to find a way to get all the characters I like onto cover. The page is 16 inches by 8 inches, so there’s lots of room but there are some design problems to consider. For one, the space taken up by the title requires a good deal of real estate. On the back cover, the ISBN number gets its fair share of space. Then there’s the problem of images bumping into the spine. For example, in the picture above, Betty’s head is cut in half by the fold. That looks weird. The more I think about it, the more problems I see with this layout. I’d better keep sketching.

Moving Characters Around to Accomodate the Book's Spine

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Today I arranged all of the individual images of my characters into a single image. I shrank Bernie and Uncle Jonny and moved them into a new line of action that converges with the main flow of characters. The two lines of action converge on Jimmy Jay and then plunge down the chimney and into the book itself.

The screenshot shows the Procreate page with a 500px grid. The yellow lines are not going to be in the final picture, of course — they help me visualize the position of the characters reaching limbs. The lavender line represents the spine area. I can see that Jimmy’s feet are too close to the spine. I need to move Jimmy a little to the right. I’ll do that tomorrow.

Guiding the eye through the picture with intention

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Up to this point in my drawing life I’ve given little thought to composition — I feel fortunate to just get a drawing that looks something like what I see in my imagination. But I know that there’s more to a good picture than simple verisimilitude. I have three Hiroshige art prints staring back at me from above my monitor and each one is a masterpiece, not because everything in the image looks like a carp, or a geisha, or a traveler in the rain. Nope. The pictures are awesome because of their composition and the way my eye travels through each picture and takes me into the Edo period.

Today I decided to try composing a picture intentionally. I need a two-page spread and I want to combine four pictures of Jimmy Jay and Buddy Butterfly playing games into a single image that flows across two facing pages from one scene to the next. Here’s my working sketch. The blue line is on a Photoshop layer, not in the sketch itself.

The original sketch was drawn lightly with an HB pencil then given some contrast with 4 duplicate layers, all using multiply mode.